Right Temporoparietal Cortex Activation during Visuo-proprioceptive Conflict

The conflict between vision and proprioception has been proposed to explain why healthy subjects perform worse than proprioceptively deafferented patients in conditions with optical displacement, e.g. novel mirror drawing. It is not known which brain processes depend upon the successful integration of visual and proprioceptive information and are therefore impaired when these modalities disagree.

With fMRI in healthy subjects we compared brain activity across two conditions with similar visual and proprioceptive stimulation and similar task demands that differed by the congruence of movement showed by the two modalities. Subjects felt the passive movement of the right index finger on a rectangular field and watched a cursor moving on a computer screen.

Cursor and finger locations either mapped onto each other (congruent condition) or did not (incongruent condition). Monitoring incongruent compared with congruent movement activated the premotor area bilaterally and the right temporoparietal junction. These brain areas have previously been associated with shifts in the attended location in the visual space.

These findings suggest an interaction between vision and proprioception in orienting to spatial locations.